In Paul Berman's continuing saga of distortion -- first in a New York Times review of my book All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone and then in the Prospect -- he concentrates on Stone's occasional conversations with a Russian official, making much ado about nothing by damagingly taking quotes out of context.
In the quibbling department, one has to wonder about Berman's concept of "frequent" versus "infrequent" in his Prospect article. He writes that "according to MacPherson, these lunches took place 'about once in every two months' -- which MacPherson somewhat oddly describes as 'infrequently.'" In my date book, meeting someone six times in 365 days doesn't qualify as anything more than infrequent.
But that's hardly the egregious act here. In both pieces Berman dissembles about a crucial fact: I emphasized in the book that Stone, along with many other journalists, knew the Russian, Oleg Kalugin, as an official press attaché diplomat in the sixties, not in his role as a KGB agent. Missing from Berman's review and then from his rebuttal to Eric Alterman are these Kalugin comments describing himself and Stone: "We had no clandestine arrangement. No secret meetings. I was the press officer." Starting with this omission, Berman has woven dishonest conclusions into his account that damage I.F. Stone's reputation and legacy. (He could have, for example, recounted the story in my book about how Stone felt so secretive about these meetings that he arranged to lunch with Kalugin at FBI director J. Edgar Hoover's favorite restaurant in order to "tweak [Hoover's] nose.")
It was bad enough that Berman's reading of my book in fact amounted to a Rorschach response to push his agenda. But even with these lapses pointed out to him by Eric Alterman in the Prospect, he continued in the same vein in a tortured response. For example he distorts the truth through the juxtaposition of disparate lines from my book: "[I]n talking to MacPherson, [Kalugin] used the words 'cooperation with the Soviet intelligence' and 'willing to perform tasks.'" This is a cut and paste job worthy of Ann Coulter. Berman juxtaposed two completely different time frames and two different areas of discussion in order to make it sound as if this was a complete and accurate rendering of Kalugin's account. "Willing to perform tasks" referred to what Kalugin says happened during the time he knew Izzy in the 1960s. "Cooperation with the Soviet intelligence" appeared in a totally different context -- Kalugin describing a 1944 incident in which a KGB official, again under cover as a press attaché, tried to meet with an unidentified reporter.
Moreover, not once did Berman convey that during my repeated questioning, Kalugin categorically retracted his "cooperation" story and admitted that he knew absolutely nothing about what Stone or any other journalist may or may not have said in 1944 to the man posing as a press attaché. Kalugin quickly admitted that all he had done was read the very public but murky VENONA files. In both of his pieces Berman omitted the following exchange from my book: "Did he [Kalugin] have actual information that Stone had ever cooperated with Soviet intelligence? 'No.'" Nor did Berman mention this crucial sentence from Kalugin: "Before I went to Washington I read some of the old spy stories [in Moscow records] for my enlightenment. I.F. Stone was not among those people. We were interested in more valuable assets." (Emphasis added.)
A more interesting fact in the book, which Berman, again, ignored, is that establishment sage Walter Lippman was far more garrulous and revealing in his conversations with this same 1944 press attaché/KGB man, if the files can be believed. Eric Alterman did a fine job of recounting this in The Nation before Berman's initial review was published.
In both of his pieces, Berman cherry-picked Kalugin's damaging quotes while overlooking many warnings in the book that cast doubt on Kalugin's utterances. Most obviously, Kalugin had a penchant for putting forth a hyperbolic, damaging statement and then instantly withdrawing it as untrue. He also readily admitted giving "disinformation" to reporters. In repeating Kalugin's many inconsistencies at length in the book, I was trying to demonstrate once and for all that posthumous lies about Stone are based on ice so thin that it crackles beneath them -- the unsubstantiated words of a Russian agent cum press attaché and fleeting mentions in Russian files of an unnamed journalist whom the KGB (again under the cover of a press attaché) tried to contact in 1944.
Many other points defy Berman's reasoning. Kalugin got such thin gruel that he can remember nothing Stone told him. He described Stone as a liberal, not a Communist, and said that "he would not hurt or damage the United States." He also said that in his pursuit of journalists, Stone was merely "on the fringe"--unlike the Time magazine reporter he talked to, which Kalugin described as a "big thing."
Except for a desire to smear Stone, why would anyone make as much as Berman continued to do in the Prospect out of Kalugin's comments that Stone would "perform tasks"? Kalugin's description of what this meant -- Stone finding out what a senator or administration official was thinking -- was almost laughable. Stone was persona non grata with senior officials due to his stance on Vietnam; he could not have found much. True, he was virtually the only journalist printing the anti-war comments of Senators Greuning and Morse, so they would be the only two that Stone likely heard anything from -- but, as Kalugin acknowledged, he was publishing it as fast as they said it. That is to say, Stone would have been seeking, and using, the same information for his very public writings. He had no secrets to pass.
Let's give it up. It can certainly be argued -- which I did in the book -- that it took Stone too long to acknowledge the full horrors of Stalin. But during the Cold War he did attack Communism and cautioned the United States to "not go the way of Russia" in suspending civil liberties and persecuting dissidents. He infuriated leftists by expressing skepticism about the innocence of A-bomb spies Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and decrying the Communist-led martyrdom campaign in their defense, with its "distorted presentation of the facts and its wild charges of anti-Semitism." Earlier in Stone's career, during the era of the Stalin-Hitler non-aggression pact, he was in a minority who supported FDR's tough slog to get congressional appropriations for aid to Britain. For this and other actions Stone was attacked by the Communist Daily Worker.
Stone's main goal during the Cold War was fighting what he rightly called the axis of McCarthy, Hoover, and the House Un-American Activities Committee in their hounding of innocent Americans. His mountainous FBI file bulges with speeches and articles that are monuments to his crusade against show trials and hearings, blacklists and wiretaps, deportations and loyalty oaths. He loved this country's ideals, which is why he fought so hard to preserve them during a time of fear and hysteria.
He also opposed bellicose and imperialist answers to world conflicts. After the A-bomb was dropped, he felt that Russia and the United States had two choices -- mutual annihilation or some form of coexistence. He lived long enough to see two old red baiters, presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, act in the manner he had long suggested regarding China and Russia. In his agonizing confession after visiting Russia in 1956, Stone gave a reason for his less-than-candid earlier public appraisals: friends had warned him to temper his criticism in the cause of a "worthy expediency" -- the "fight for world peace." But he hated "the morass into which one wanders when one begins to withhold the truth because the consequences might be bad -- this is, indeed the morass on which the Russian Communist state is built." For the last three decades of his life he attacked the Soviet Union and defended dissidents behind the Iron Curtain. One of his last acts was to hold a candle during a rally supporting Communist student dissidents in China.
Stone influenced a generation of journalists to dig for facts in documents and find sources in the "bowels of government" rather than among the spin-sters. And he was far ahead of the pack in identifying and analyzing pivotal developments in the 20th century -- the rise of fascism and Hitler; the struggles of American laborers; the New Deal; disastrous Cold War policies; the greatness of the civil rights movement; the follies of the Vietnam War; covert actions carried out by the FBI and the CIA; the strength and weaknesses of the anti-war movement; the scandal of Iran-Contra; the class greed of Reaganomics.
His constant, brave barrage against Hoover earned him a 5,000 page FBI file and four decades of hounding by one of the most pernicious men in American history. The FBI tapped Stone's phone, pawed through Stone's garbage, trailed him into cigar stores and confiscated such subversive mail as Stone's letters to his hearing aid company. And what did Hoover find about the man he would so have loved to expose as a Communist and spy? Nothing. Remember this when critics engage in fancy contortions to find something else.
Myra MacPherson is the author of All Governments Lie! The Life and Times of Rebel Journalist I.F. Stone.
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